An evil, grinning chimp with fangs? A crying woman in a blue dress? A goateed, wide-eyed doctor in a lab coat ready to plunge some unknown instrument into your skull? A hollow-eyed, distraught boy kneeling on the ground? A bizarre fight between an emaciated bull and a reptilian creature? Who came with this stuff, the psychological warfare section of the KGB?

But maybe we’re being too hard on the Soviets. Let’s face it, American playgrounds aren’t exactly free from disturbing stuff, either. Any playground that has a jungle gym, an old-fashioned merry-go-ground, and “monkey bars” is bound to present its share of childhood horror. And the decorations at some playgrounds are unsettling, too. We used to live a block away from a park we called “Yogi Bear Park” because it had a teeter-totter where the fulcrum was a covered by a cheap plastic depiction of the head of Yogi Bear. The adults recognized the figure as Smarter than the Average Bear, but to little kids it was an unknown, apparently grimacing figure wearing a bad hat and a tie. What the parents saw as Yogi, the kids perceived as a weird, lurking presence. Not surprisingly, the tykes tended to steer clear of old Yogi.

For that matter, childhood is filled with intentionally scary stuff that suggests that adults get a kick out of frightening youngsters. “Fairy tales” aren’t happy stories about fairies, but horror shows of child-eating witches, child-eating wolves, and other evil creatures ready to devour any wayward kid. Hey, kids! How about a bedtime story?

We apparently delight in terrifying children. The Russian playgrounds just bring it out into the open.

Recently Kish and I stopped at a Bob Evans for a cup of coffee. As we waited at the to-go counter, we stood by the glass display case that offered all kinds of tantalizing coffee cakes, crumb cakes, and gigantic cookies. It was a classic example of conscious retail design to encourage impulse buying: as long as you’re here, picking up your order, why not go for one of these delectable items, too?

The coffee cakes looked awfully good, but we resisted the temptation and stuck with our lone cup of coffee.

It reminded me of a kind of rite of passage during my early teenage years. Mom used to buy Sara Lee pecan coffee cake that I found irresistible. It was dense and moist and sweet and cinnamony, with swirls of icing and crunchy pecans. Although it was sold in kind of aluminum dish so it could be heated and served hot, I always took my Sara Lee coffee cake cold, with a tall glass of cold milk as accompaniment. And on some days, I’d have a second piece, too. And maybe a third.

But after a while I realized that I wasn’t exactly maintaining fighting trim, and if I wanted to actually get a date with a girl I needed to do something about it. It wasn’t just the Sara Lee, of course, there was the lure of Frosted Flakes, and Coke and all kinds of snack foods, and a lifestyle that involved too much TV watching and not enough exercising. And, at bottom, the inability to enjoy things like that Sara Lee pecan coffee cake in moderation, rather than in gluttonous excess. But I swore off the Sara Lee, and I don’t think I’ve had any since.

Could I enjoy a sliver of Sara Lee and a glass of milk, without promptly ravishing the entire cake? I’d like to think so, but I’m not going to test that hypothesis. Sometimes it’s more prudent to just avoid temptation altogether.

The clip above from the old rock TV show The Midnight Special — where the band is jarringly introduced by a mustachioed Bill Cosby — captures the group performing live in 1973, which is about the same time I first heard their music. The song they performed live on that show, Reelin’ In The Years, is a guitar-driven classic that was one of the first Steely Dan songs that caused me to buy their albums. It was perfect for those high school days, allowing the boys with the bad ’70s haircuts and monster bellbottoms and tight polyester shirts to play some air guitar when the song came on the radio in the car before belting out lyrics that didn’t really make a lot of sense but were great to sing, anyway.

Becker and Fagen were genuises at coming up with the riffs and the obscure, tantalizing lyrics that wormed their way into your head. Like Neil Young in that same time period, they kept reinventing themselves. When you bought a Steely Dan album, whether it was Katy Lied or Can’t Buy A Thrill or Aja, or any of the other great albums they put out in the ’70s, you never were quite sure what you were going to get — but you knew it would be interesting. And you could spend hours debating what the hell the lyrics to songs like Black Cow or Bodhisattva or Deacon Blues were all about, too. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, I think of Steely Dan’s Black Friday, and as it plays back in miy mind it stills sounds as great as it did when I first heard it, back in college.

Farewell, Walter Becker, and thank you for adding a little bit of richness and mystery to our lives. (And 67 seems like a pretty young age to go, by the way.)

At last night’s game we got a free Edwin Encarnacion jersey. It’s the traditional design, in a size large enough to comfortably fit most reasonably sized people, and looks pretty sharp. The jersey features that “press-on” type lettering, however — which means I’ll be giving it kid glove treatment.

I first learned this important life lesson in 1973, when I used my Big Bear bag boy earnings to buy a cool orange Eric Clapton t-shirt with a press-on picture of the Guitar God on the front. (I know . . . “cool” and “orange t-shirt” are rarely used in the same sent, but you must remember it was the ’70s.) I wore it, put it in the laundry basket for Mom to wash, and got back a fundamentally changed garment. The shirt had shrunk about five sizes and the picture of Clapton had become a cracked, crumbling, unrecognizable mess. Gah! But, because I paid for it with my own money, I continued to use it as one of the t-shirts I wore under my jeans shirt — and avoided buying press-on t-shirts thereafter.

It may be that press-on technology has improved in the last 45 years, but I’m not taking any chances. The EE jersey won’t be seeing the washer, ever.

Many people are scared to death of clowns and hate the sight of them. In the case of Pennywise, the murderous clown who terrorizes the children of a small town in It, a strong case of clown fear is justified, but many people have a deep dread of all clowns, whether or not the clowns have a habit of dragging little kids into ancient sewer systems. They think they are creepy, with all that white face paint and weird eye makeup and unnatural hair and silly hats and bulging costumes, and they probably don’t much care for the twisting motions and squealing sounds when clowns make balloon animals, either.

Clown fear — the word for it is coulrophobia — seems to be an innate part of some people’s psychological makeup and starts at an early age. You can spend a few hilarious minutes on the internet checking out videos of panicked, crying little kids fleeing from the clown who Dad hired to entertain the kids at a birthday party. They intuitively hate clowns, just like baby birds intuitively hate snakes.

Clowns don’t scare me or creep me out. I’ve got a different problem with them — I don’t think they’re funny. Ever since going to my first circus, I’ve been mystified by why some people think clown acts are hilarious. There’s not much subtlety to clown acts, either. And don’t even get me started about those serious, sad-faced, pantomiming clown acts that are supposed to leave you with a tear in your eye and a strong sense of pathos.

Typically, I find “top [number of your choice]” lists to be infuriating, and when a writer purports to do something like determine the “best” music of an entire decade I just can’t get beyond the sheer presumptuousness of the whole concept. And, of course, these days such stories are obvious clickbait, right up there with stories about “weird tricks” to give you more energy or updates on how each member of the cast of Taxi looks these days.

But, of course, I yielded, after Snow teased me with the information that the list put Dark Side of the Moon at number 10. Eh? If that Pink Floyd opus is only number 10, what in the world was ranked ahead of it? So I opened the list and was immediately inflamed and enraged by pretty much everything on it. Who was on the list, and how often. Who wasn’t on the list. And, of course, where albums were ranked, too.

The Stones’ Exile on Main Street as the number one album of the ’70s is a joke. Two Black Sabbath albums in the top 50? Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on the list, when it should be Honky Chateau? (If you’re going to put Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on the list, why not put on The Carpenters, or KC and the Sunshine Band while you’re at it?) How can you include Hotel California rather than On The Border? How can you include Sticky Fingers? And where’s Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, or Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night (or Harvest, or Rust Never Sleeps), or the debut album of The Cars, or Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, or Band On The Run — among others? And does every top-50 list have to include nods to iconic figures like the Clash, or Miles Davis, or Bob Dylan, or the Velvet Underground, or the Sex Pistols, that all rankers seem to include as a matter of course to establish their rock critic bona fides? And for that matter, when you’re presuming to do a ranking list, are we talking about artistic influence, or are we trying to acknowledge the great music that people actually listened to and that powered the decade?

The ’70s was the time period I was in high school and college, so it’s the decade where I spent the most time listening to music, thinking about music, and reading about music. I’d go up to my room during high school and listen to albums like Deep Purple’s Machine Head (appropriately on the list, I might add), and music was always playing in my apartment when I was going to Ohio State. By reason of those life experiences, I care about this stuff — and this list really sticks in my craw.

Next time, I’m going to stick with my inclination to not read these lists in the first place.

When we were kids and lived on The Circle in semi-rural Bath, Ohio, a typical summer day went like this: we got up early, ate cereal, and ran from the house to play outside with the gang of other kids in the neighborhood. We’d ride our bikes and climb trees, play “army” and baseball and kickball, build dams and catch tadpoles in the creek that ran through the woods, and make up stupid games. Except for stopping to eat a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches served by one of the moms in the neighborhood — usually selected at random — we were outside and on our own all day long, and after we’d eaten dinner at home, often at the picnic table outside, we’d find our friends again and catch lightning bugs and play freeze tag until it was time for bed. And if we were lucky enough to go somewhere for a beach vacation (in our case, to Ocean City, New Jersey), we’d dig in the sand, bury each other, and build sand castles.

I remember those long, hot summer days fondly — but if you read the expert advice given to parents these days, you’d think that our entire group of friends was unbelievably lucky to survive them without experiencing serious injury or lifelong trauma.

All of these cautions about potential death-dealing problems lurking outside on that sunny summer’s day are bad enough, but what’s really troubling about these “rules” for child safety is that they presuppose that the parents are right there, at all times, making sure that the kids don’t take off their shoes or touch creek water or walk on sand or risk brushing up against what might be a poisonous plant. We seem to have totally lost the notion that kids might actually be able to fend for themselves, and that whatever problems might occur — skinned knees, bug bites, sun burns, and the like — were a small price to pay for letting kids get lots of fresh air, have fun, engage in creative, self-directed play, and establish a little independence with their neighborhood friends.

If you took these warnings seriously, you’d decide that the best course is to just keep your kids inside, where there are fewer dangers around every corner and they can be in your line of sight at all times, as they sit watching TV, or playing video games, or tapping away on a computer. Could it be that the worries about outdoor play that the experts have raised, and the parental response to them, have contributed to the rise in asthma, obesity, and diabetes in children who never go outside and get any exercise, sunshine, or fresh air without being lathered with sunscreen and scrutinized by helicopter parents?

Who knows more about what kids are capable of — the skittish experts of our modern world, or those Moms of the ’60s who were perfectly willing to let their kids go out and play, unattended by adults, confident that the kids could take care of themselves. I’ll trust the practical experience of the ’60s Moms over the experts any day.